Srei Infrastructure Finance Limited has decided to augment the capital of its infrastructure finance and equipment finance businesses, a company official said here on Monday.

The move will result in the listing of the company's equipment finance business through a composite scheme of arrangement and amalgamation.

"Today's (Monday) decision will lead to substantial increase in net shareholders' fund and allow shareholders of Srei to directly hold shares of both infrastructure finance and equipment finance businesses," Chairman and Managing Director Hemant Kanoria said.

According to Kanoria, the board of directors of the company at a meeting held here on Monday has approved the scheme, which is subject to regulatory, statutory and other necessary approvals.

"The proposed capital augmentation scheme is expected to further infuse around Rs. 500 crore in our equipment finance business and will pave the way for growth in its revenue and profit," Kanoria said.

He said global and domestic investors will also be able to take advantage of the opportunities.

Following the government's budgetary allocations in roads, railways, ports, affordable housing and other infrastructure space, the growth prospect of infrastructure and equipment finance businesses has improved.

In the last few years, there has been significant growth in sales of construction, mining and allied equipment and the industry expects the demand to remain strong in the coming years, he added.

Resuming its self-driving programme, global ride-sharing major Uber has hired a "micromobility robotics" team to work on autonomous bikes and scooters.

The company is working to develop electric scooters and bicycles which can drive themselves around cities in order to reach customers and charging points.

Electric scooter and bicycle-sharing services, including Uber's Jump business as well as competitors Bird and Lime, allow customers to collect the vehicles and then leave them on the pavement outside their destination, The Telegraph reported late on Sunday.

"The business hasn't published any further information on the project, but said in an online hiring page that it plans to 'improve safety, rider experience, and operational efficiency of our shared electric scooters and bicycles through the application of sensing and robotics technologies'," the report added.

The company is facing stiff competition from Lime, Lyft and numerous other entrants.

The move would give it a way to stand out, not to mention ingratiate itself with city officials who would otherwise balk, according to the Engadget.

The company's self-driving car division was temporarily shut down in 2018 after a fatal crash in the US state of Arizona.

A self-driving Volvo SUV from Uber travelling at 64 km per hour had killed a woman, triggering a heated debate on whether autonomous cars are safe enough and who is to blame for the death.

Here is good news for the micro small medium enterprise (MSME) sector in India. Under technology innovation, a move is on to bring down the price of automated guided vehicles (AGVs), which are used for moving materials in the industry, from Rs 15-20 lakh to just Rs 1 lakh.

IIT Roorkee and Tetrahedron Manufacturing Services (TMS) Pvt Ltd, a start-up company, have signed an MoU for designing and developing the low cost AGVs with appropriate profit margin.

Manufacturing industries nowadays are using future technologies like AGVs, 3D printing and robotics like never before in the past, market sources said.

A standard AGV used in the industry to transport the material within the industrial premises without any human intervention usually costs around Rs 15 to 20 lakh. Using such an autonomous system benefits the vehicles to make routing decisions based on real-time feedback of environment conditions along with the ease of navigational adjustments.

But to make this transition holistic and effective, scientists at IIT Roorkee say there is a need to bring small and medium scale manufacturing industries into this journey toward a better future.

IIT Roorkee and TMS, a tech-based start-up by the alumini of IIT Roorkee, NIT Rourkela and IIM Kolkata has come forward to tackle this hurdle and to design and develop the low-cost AGV.

The scientists claim that the future production of such AVGs would bring the price well under the Rs 1 lakh per vehicle so that even small and medium scale industries can take a step forward toward automation.

TMS Pvt Ltd is a technology start-up founded in 2015 and has achieved 300 percent year-on-year growth for the past three years.

After signing the MoU, Ajit Kumar Chaturvedi, Director, IIT Roorkee, said: "IIT Roorkee is being given the task to bring down the cost with effective technology. We are happy to associate with TMS which opens a new chapter for the institute and we look forward towards increased collaborative work."

Nitin Kumar, Founder of TMS, said: "This pact with IIT Roorkee will bring about exchange of experts, research development, training and industrial relation for mutual benefits. This collaboration is expected to bring a major change involving research and development as well as sharing of facilities, data, knowledge and skills in related areas."

India's sugar production has increased by 8.32 per cent year-on-year to 14.6 million tonnes till January 15 but overall output at the end of the season will be lower than the previous year, the Indian Sugar Mills Association (ISMA) said on Monday.

In a statement, the ISMA, which represents private sugar mills, said Uttar Pradesh had crushed 38.21 million tonnes of sugarcane and produced 4.19 million tonnes of sugar till January 15.

Based on satellite images of cane area in January 2019, ISMA said the output in the state would be 11.28 million tonnes in sugar year 2018-19 starting October due to the reduction in yield and increased sugar recovery per cent as against the 12.05 million tonnes in 2017-18.

Total sugar production in the country would be around 30.7 million tonnes in 2018-19 as against 32.25 million tonnes in 2017-18.

Maharashtra has produced 5.72 million tonnes till January 15, an increase of 0.7 million tonnes year-on-year basis, and the final output would be 9.5 million tonnes.

Another major sugar producing state, Karnataka, has produced 2.67 million tonnes so far and it would produce 4.2 million tonnes at the end of the sugar season.

The industry body said sugar production as on January 15 was 0.2 million tonnes in Tamil Nadu, 0.53 million tonnes in Gujarat, 0.32 million tonnes in Bihar, 0.31 million tonnes in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, 0.2 million tonnes in Punjab, 0.22 million tonnes in Haryana, 0.13 million tonnes in Uttarakhand and 0.16 million tonnes in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

Cane price arrears as on December 31 was around Rs 19,000 crore, including Rs 2,800 crore of arrears of the previous season.

This is substantially higher from the arrears of around Rs 10,600 crore last season, ISMA said.

Kotak Mahindra Bank on Monday reported a 22.57 per cent increase in its standalone net profit during the October-December quarter on a year-on-year basis.

Its standalone net profit stood at Rs 1,290.93 crore, up from Rs 1,053.21 crore recorded during the third quarter of the financial year 2017-18, the bank said in a regulatory filing at the BSE.

The private lender's total income during Q3 of ongoing financial year (2018-19) was Rs 7,214.21 crore, higher by 19.26 per cent from Rs 6,049.02 crore earned during the corresponding period of the previous year.

"As on December 31, 2018, the GNPA (Gross Non-Performing Asset) was 2.07 per cent and NNPA (Net Non-Performing Asset) was 0.71 per cent," it said.

Capital adequacy ratio of the bank, including unaudited profits as per Basel-III, as on December 31 was 18.1 per cent and Tier-I ratio was 17.6 per cent.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who is in the US for a medical check up, will return home on Friday, well ahead of the Budget presentation on February 1, official sources said.

"The Finance Minister is set to return on the evening of January 25," said a senior official. "The interim budget will be presented by him for sure," he said. He added that the process for printing of Budget documents began on Monday.

Jaitley, 66, left for the US on January 13 for what was believed to be a medical check-up relating to his kidney ailment. He had undergone a renal transplant surgery in May 2018.

However, there has been wide speculation that he may not be able to return early to present the interim budget, which will be his last before the general elections this year.

Jaitley had recently hinted that it may not be a simple interim budget or vote on account, which is generally the tradition in an election year. The full budget is presented by the new government after the elections.

"Ordinarily, there should be no reason why we should move away from that convention but there is a larger interest of the economy that always dictate what goes into that interim budget," he said on Thursday.

Informed sources said that the government may roll out schemes to help increase farmers' income, reduce farm input costs and raise credit flow to farmers.

Ministers of State for Finance Pon Radhakrishnan and Shiv Pratap Shukla on Monday held the annual pre-budget ritual, Halwa Ceremony, to mark the beginning of printing of Budget documents in the North Block, the seat of Ministry of Finance.

Pharmaceutical major Sun Pharma's stock gained 4 per cent to touch a high of Rs 406.35 on Monday after it ended Friday's trade lower at more than 8 per cent.

The pharma scrip was beaten down heavily on Friday as it lost close to 13 per cent intra-day following a complaint by a whistleblower to the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) against the company, raising issues of corporate governance.

At 11.41 a.m., Sun Pharma traded Rs 11.20 or 2.87 per cent higher from its previous close of Rs 390.75. It touched an intra-day high of 406.35 and a low of 390.75.

On Friday, after the steep fall in its share price, Sun Pharma in a letter to Sebi said there is great asymmetry in information circulating between analysts, investors and the media, leading to intense speculation.

"We wish to bring to your kind notice an alleged second whistleblower complaint filed against our Company, which we learned from a media report on January 15, 2019," Sun Pharma had said on Friday.

Billionaire Elon Musk's infrastructure and tunnel construction firm Boring Company has laid off five employees, barely a month after it unveiled its first tunnel in the US.

According to the Recode, on Friday, the company terminated five employees, at least some of whom helped construct that first underground passageway.

The spokesman said that the employees were fired for performance reasons as part of regular performance reviews, the report added.

"The Boring Company is hiring for over a dozen roles, pursuing a number of projects across the country, and planning to grow significantly in 2019," he was quoted as saying in the report.

Musk had unveiled the prototype tunnel for his envisioned zero-emission, high-speed transit system -- including a surface-to-tunnel car elevator and a Tesla modified -- to run along the tunnel track, outside SpaceX's California headquarters in mid-December 2018, according to the Fast Company.

In Chicago, the company was reportedly slated to build a "Loop" which they described on their website as: "Loop is a high-speed underground public transportation system in which passengers are transported on autonomous electric skates travelling at 125-150 miles per hour."

In order to implement this system, the company will have to dig the tunnels and deploy the infrastructure to move the "autonomous electric skates" inside the tunnels.

"Electric skates will carry between 8 and 16 passengers, or a single passenger vehicle," according to the Electrek.

Electric car making firm Tesla, also founded by Musk, announced last Friday it was laying off seven per cent of its full-time staffers in an attempt to reduce costs and increase profits.

All employees at the company were informed about the development in an email.

Musk-led private spaceflight company SpaceX also announced that it would lay off 10 per cent of its workforce to fund other projects.

SpaceX, which has a contract with NASA to deliver cargo to the International Space Station (ISS), is now planning to start flying astronauts to the ISS for NASA later this year.

China's economy grew 6.6 per cent in 2018, the weakest annual performance since 1990, confirming a slowdown in the world's second-largest economy that could threaten global growth, according to official data on Monday.

China's growth in 2018 was down from 6.8 per cent growth in 2017.

The country's economy grew 6.4 per cent in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, levels last seen in early 2009 at the height of the global financial crisis.

"We see that there are changes in stability, concern about these changes. The external environment is complicated and severe," Efe news quoted Ning Jizhe, director of China's National Statistic Bureau, as saying in a media conference on Monday.

"The economy is facing downward pressure," Ning added.

Adding to the gloom was the ongoing trade conflict with Washington, according to the data.

The uncertain outlook for Chinese exporters caused companies to delay investing and hiring and in some cases even to resort to layoffs - a practice that is often discouraged by China's stability-obsessed Communist Party rulers.

The official jobless rate ticked up to 4.9 per cent last month from 4.8 per cent in November.

In the southern technology and export-manufacturing centre of Shenzhen, for instance, many private makers of electronics, textiles and auto parts furloughed workers more than two months before the Lunar New Year holiday, which begins in February, according to business owners and local officials.

The neighbouring city of Guangzhou saw growth slump to 6.5 per cent last year - well short of the 7.5 per cent annual target set by the city government - as trade tensions hit the city's manufacturing sector hard.

Some economists and investors have said China's economy is far more anaemic than the government's 6.6 per cent rate of expansion for 2018.

They said the government's move on Friday, just ahead of Monday's data release, to cut the 2017 growth rate to 6.8 per cent from 6.9 per cent, which they said provides a slightly lower base, giving a slight boost to the fresh 2018 data.

Monday's economic data also included some indications that this year's downturn may not be as severe as initially thought, reports the Guardian.

The country's industrial output rose 5.7 per cent, while retail sales increased 8.2 per cent in December, compared to a year earlier.

Chinese Vice Premier Liu He will visit the US on January 30-31 for the next round of trade talks with Washington.

US President Donald Trump said on Saturday there has been progress toward a trade deal with China, but denied that he was considering lifting tariffs.